Control, it gets a bad reputation. Trust me, I know. What I’ve come to realize through this path of addiction is the stunning elegance that exists inside of being taken by something you would do anything to have. Control taught me beautiful things about how deeply I love and feel things, and how devoted I am.
For someone addicted to control, surrender sounds ironic, until you realize that the act of control is itself a surrender. The idea of surrender is to give yourself fully to something, to be fully immersed into a world. For as long as I can remember, I had a craving to be immersed in the infinite. My father was an opium addict, and watching him, I learned what it meant to be taken. As a child, I was enamored by my father’s pious ritual of opium smoking. I would lay on the edge of the bed. He’d be laying on his left side, facing me. In front of him was the plate that contained the opium lamp, opium needle, little round tin can that he used to shape the opium, and a little cup filled with pieces of opium ready for use. His opium pipe contained a mystery that was magical and powerful. Seductive enough to draw my father to its worship hours after hours, forgoing his family duties, activities, and all other desires.
I studied his motions, the intricate details of preparing the opium in just the right way to get it ready for smoking. Once it was ready, he would reach for his pipe. Bring it up towards his mouth and hold the bulb head angled over the flame. Then, the moment I would be waiting for. He heated the opium from the needle and inserted it into the tiny hole on the bulb.
The opium crackled as the heat disintegrated it into a thick lava, as he continued to insert it into the hole, and sucked on the pipe. The vapor blew out of his nose, danced before me and evaporated into tiny particles in the room, leaving behind a trace of sweet, buttery, acidic, poignant perfume. I inhaled the scent into my lungs. I was in love with that smell. That dark room in our house was where I sat in the infinite with my father. We were absorbed into a sanctuary of our own.
This memory later informed me of why I dove into the thicket of control and would spend years inside its labyrinth, navigating the ins and outs, learning to hate it and love it, to run from it and towards it. I was proud of myself for being well put together and independent, self-sufficient enough to not need anyone or anything. I never let anyone get close enough to me to feel that much passion, until I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t outrun the overwhelming passion I was avoiding. Then, I would completely surrender to the obsession of a relationship. I could touch those places I didn’t think I’d ever go.
I remember the first time I really tasted obsession. It was during a dinner with my friend and her boyfriend. I loved cooking, so one night I made us dinner. I wanted to impress them. I made rotisserie chicken that was perfectly spiced and moist, with oven-crispy skin, the kind that makes you eat the whole thing and lick your fingers afterwards. I included baked figs with goat cheese and walnut, so you get a mix of nuttiness along with the poignancy of goat cheese and the sweetness from the fig.
I placed everything neatly at the dinner table. The low light gave the room a warm, honey ambiance; I bought flowers for the table earlier that day. It felt more like the meal was making me, moving through me, directing what spices to use and the best way to serve the meal. There was a force that came through, to want to love and care and take care of, and, when that force was plugged in to my guests, it found relief. This obsession over their relationship proved I had the capacity to love and care, and that my creativity could find expression outward when I am deeply inside something.
Through my addiction, I learned I was a devoted person. When I am connected to someone (or something), I devote everything to it: my thoughts, my actions, my purpose. I’ve always thought it was cheesy to be so connected to someone that you finish each other’s sentences or know what the other person is thinking and feeling. Once I experienced it, I understood the beauty of it. It’s like the experience people claim they have with psychedelics, where you are one with the universe; the same way the musician becomes the instrument that the music is being expressed through, and you don’t know if the musician is playing the instrument or the instrument is playing the musician.
I remember being in a car ride with my friend and thinking about buying Fage yogurt, and, as soon as I told her, she laughed and said she was just thinking about eating Fage yogurt. There were so many of those moments in our relationship. I didn’t have to think about what to do, I just knew. I wanted to continue to serve that connection. This kind of experience is often labeled as co-dependency, but to me it was the epitome of connection and union, where I am so in tune, I am feeling and hearing things before they are expressed with words. Being so singularly focused on one person made life a thrilling adventure.
If I could have kept going, devoting myself to serving just one person, I would have gladly done so. But eventually, it was time for something more. There was a call to transition, to take that single focused devotion and spread it out further. This started my erotic recovery.
When the form naturally transitioned, I plugged the impulse into creativity, art, and service with the same obsession, union, and devotion I had to addiction. It stopped mattering so much what someone else was doing. My control became organized chaos in the kitchen, where it’s me and the ingredients I’m working with, creating color and texture and flavors. I saw that the connection to the infinite I sought in my life was born through witnessing my father prostrating himself day and night in front of his opium smoking. Through my writing, his shadow became my light. My obsession with food and writing became the languages through which the devotion in me could express itself.
In erotic recovery, this creativity became the driving force in my cooking, where I wasn’t creating an amazing meal in search of approval, but because it was nourishing for me to be so absorbed in the process. The first time I realized making food was a way for this creativity to come through was accidental. I was in the kitchen making a simple dish of brown rice, pan-seared salmon, and steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. The meal was simple, so I didn’t need to follow a recipe. I let my tastebuds and hands do the guiding. In that kitchen, I lost all sense of time. My hands and feet were guided by something other than myself, timing each dish to come out perfectly on time. The green, white and orange of the vegetables became vivid and alive as they steamed and were cooked to the perfect crunch. Friends would ask me how long I steamed my vegetables for so that they could duplicate it, but I couldn’t tell them. I just knew when they were done, without fail every time, without a timer. The salmon would be perfectly seared with crispy skins, but still moist in its texture. I would sit down with friends to eat and often have the experience that someone else made that amazing meal. That was what it felt like to be moved by something bigger than myself. The end result was always, someone else did that.
I felt nourished through the whole immersive process of cooking and providing nourishment to someone else allowed me the satiating experience of giving to others. This was how I would move through the next phase of my life in recovery, reharnessing that impulse into service and creativity.
I could also dive inside my writing and be moved by it the same way I did with my relationships and my cooking. The first piece I wrote immersed me inside the process to where I felt taken over by it. I wrote into the night, unable to put my laptop away until the writing was done with me. The piece turned out to be a ritual all its own, the blissfulness of getting words out of my head, and transferring them to the reader to experience a visceral understanding of the mystery, bliss, and fear of its power.
Through Erotic recovery, I learned that anytime I am fixated on a finite person or situation, it is because I needed to plug into that outlet of creativity, whether in the kitchen or at my laptop. The fixation is pent-up expression that simply wants to create. Through creation, I am able to experience the infinite.
